Identity, sexuality, and the conditions under which the work takes shape
A reading of the memoir Whore of New York: A Confession by Laura Roux
***3/3***
Most writing about sex work falls into two categories: defence or titillation. Both are incomplete. What interests me is something else entirely: the choices we make, a kind of professional coming-of-age, the circumstances that led up to that, and insight into the decision-making process. Even if whoring may not be the world’s oldest profession, it is certainly the most fascinating and controversial.
Whore of New York: A Confession, by Laura Roux sits in that space. The memoir is not about Sex Work as performance, but one that shows the best and worst of the profession, how the author’s own journey led her to making this choice, and also the flowering of her sexuality alongside her work in the sexual domain.
Sometimes you read a book that just grabs you. The people in it, the narrative, becomes something you can crawl inside of, that you can feel. Mostly, that is a kind of happy-only narrative. This book has much more nuance and complexity, which is what I liked most.
Whore of New York by Liara Roux resonated. An autobiography, the book is a rare glimpse into the genesis of an escort. What her life was like growing up. How she came to The Work. Glimpses of her experiences.
Reviews are so often promotional in nature, breathless in their descriptions, tantalising and titillating. Especially when they have a whiff of scandal or sex about them. I found this book to be one of the best renditions of this Demi-monde. It is raw, confessional, at times sexy, but also brutal and harsh.
What I loved most about the book was that it didn’t fetishize or glamourise Sex Work. In fact, it is hardly about Sex Work at all. It is a book about life, relationships, growing up, mental health. It is a very human narrative.
The deepest thread in the book is about the gradual recognition and evolution of her own sexuality. The movement towards understanding herself as either gay or bisexual emerges through lived experience, relationships, and contrast. The awkward fumbling, the confusing feelings, shame. It felt true and real and something I could also relate to. This was the part of the book that spoke to me most directly, not as a moment of clarity, but as a process of noticing, testing, and, at times, resisting what is already there.
Central to the book is an exploration of feeling and motivation, none of which is presented as “because of this, I did this”…but rather simply showing her life as it unfolded. Yes, an author can always be selective about the information they convey, but there was nothing here that felt out of place, artificial, forced.
We never really perceive our own lives as structural narrative. Reality is far too messy for that. There is no neat sequencing of cause and effect. We all make a series of decisions with partial information, and they are shaped by context, pressure, and need. For those of who us who are in the work, we can see it clearly. We never become Sex Workers through a singular logic, but through an accumulation of factors, whether economic, sexual or otherwise, real desires, or even constraints that only make sense when looking back.
Reading of her marriage to an abusive partner, it was impossible not to be in her pain with her. The feeling of loyalty to a partner, the internalisation that ‘I am the one at fault’, not the abuser. How common that is for those of us who have experienced this. How we seek to please those around us, especially women. The exploitation described here is not a function of the profession, even if our work increases our precarity because of the legal and social context in which it sits but is more reflective of an abusive dynamic that could exist in any context.
There is very little in the book about Sex Work itself. There is some discussion of the relentless pace and travel schedule she maintained, but it is more about how her wife exploited her, abused her, used her, took her money and made her work despite its horrible effects on the author’s health.
The snippets of her work life are sympathetically portrayed as she focusses on a small number of clients that she enjoyed spending time with. What I took from these gentle narrations was not the act or content of their interactions, but her descriptions of how she nurtured her clients, and how they also took care of her.
What is implicit here is that these dynamics do not happen by accident. They are built, maintained, and selected for, and not every client is capable of participating in them at this level. I like this, because the external perception of our collective work, or even the idea that anyone could possibly know what a session is really like, even begin to understand the deep dynamic which plays out between two people, is so very rarely seen. This is one of the book’s greatest strengths.
We, society at large, often concentrate on the exploitative elements that we might imagine comes with this work. There was none of that. If anything, one takes away how for Liara, Sex Work gave independence, purpose. It is also painfully clear that she is a bright, well-educated human, one with options, choices. That she chose the profession she did becomes very understandable as we see her through her childhood and young adulthood.
A part of what resonated for me in her story is how parallel the “finding herself” aspects of beginning in the Profession related to what I am going through now. Figuring out what I want to do and why, what my boundaries are, who I am willing to see, how much I am willing to work, why I would even do it in the first place. All great questions.
This book was hard for me to put down. It is engaging and well-written, with an enticing prose style. I hope that she takes this opener and continues to write, whether about her own life or through fiction.
What the book leaves the reader with is a set of questions rather than conclusions. What does it mean to choose this work, and under what conditions does that choice hold? What distinguishes endurance from agency? And how do relationships, both personal and professional, shape the terms under which we operate? These are not abstract considerations. Insofar as work defines meaning for many of us, without clarity on these topics, it is very hard to navigate life effectively.
It is not often that an autobiography reads so compellingly, and that you want to cheer for her success, protect her from the jerks, help her to see the toxic people and their bad ways around her…in short, it is one of those few stories where she is in your living room, in your life, fully human, fully manifest, fully come to life.
If you are interested at all in having a glimpse into the life of a high-end escort, what brought her there, what keeps her there, and what kind of lifestyle she lives, this is a great place to start.
About the Author
Mx Valentina is a London-based escort and professional dominatrix working at the intersection of power, intimacy, and identity.
Her practice is grounded in a deep understanding of human sexuality and its relationship to our bodies, and our self-perception within a social context. Her explorations with power dynamics in particular, offer clients a safe way to let go of shame and to explore their deerp structure.
She writes on sex work, relationships, and the dynamics of desire across her platforms, and is a co-founder of Aetas Deae, a women-centred project on Lake Como which explores philosophy, praxis, and community through lived experience.
About the Author
Mx Valentina is a London-based escort and professional dominatrix working at the intersection of power, intimacy, and identity. Her practice is grounded in structure, clarity, and mutual awareness, with a focus on experiences that are deliberate rather than performative.
She writes on sex work, relationships, and the dynamics of desire across her platforms, and is the founder of Aetas Deae, a project exploring philosophy, praxis, and community through lived experience.
You can find more of Valentina’s writing on Substack where she writes Diary of a Sex Witch
